Up In Arms

67 Years After The `War To End Wars,` The World Remains Mired In Conflict

November 10, 1985|By Article by The Tribune foreign staff Contributing to this article were Jonathan Broder, based in Tel Aviv, whose report covers the Middle East; Ray Moseley, London, reporting from Europe and Africa; Ron Yates, Tokyo, from various points in Asia and the Pacific; and Vincent Schodolski, Mexico City, from Central and South America.

War is hell,`` said Gen. George S. Patton, who fought his way through the biggest of them all. He echoed the sentiment of the Roman philosopher Seneca, whose summation of the folly of war was equally pithy: ``Men practice war;

beasts do not.`` There is almost universal agreement about the iniquity of war, but it remains mankind`s worst habit, one seemingly impossible to shake off. In this respect, new generations do not learn from the mistakes of the past. As civilization progresses in a technical sense, the resort to war becomes ever more frequent.

In the early part of this century there was ``the war to end all wars``-- the ``Great War,`` as some called it, World War I. It ended 67 years ago this Monday, but it did not, of course, end war. Instead it set the stage for the most monumental conflict of all time, World War II, and that in turn failed to exhaust man`s appetite for slaughter on a mass scale. There have been between 150 and 300 wars around the globe since World War II, depending on how you define war.

Monday`s anniversary of the end of World War I finds the United States, whose troops last saw combat in Lebanon and Grenada in 1983, at peace. But conflict involving millions of people is under way in every part of the globe. They`re fighting in the deep jungles of Asia, in the deserts of the Middle East, in the African bush, in the mountains and villages of Central America. Most of the fighting rages in the Third World, that belt of nations that otherwise have poverty as their only common characteristic.

Each month 41,000 people around the world die in armed conflict. That has been the average toll since World War II ended 40 years ago. It adds up to almost 20 million lives, three out of every five of them hapless civilians, according to the United Nations.

The nature of warfare has been revolutionized in the 67 years since World War I ended, to a greater extent than in any comparable period in history. World War I was a static war, fought from trenches with rifles, bayonets and artillery. The genius of Adolf Hitler`s generals in using tanks and armored vehicles, and the advent of air power, made armies more mobile and brought the violence of war to civilian populations once relatively secure behind the battle lines. The Vietnam war added a few refinements, such as rapid movement of troops by helicopter and the first use of ``smart`` bombs. Now a new generation of ultrasophisticated weapons is about to come into service that will enable countries to attack rear-echelon forces 50 to 200 miles from the battlefront with pinpoint accuracy and devastating firepower.

In an age of nuclear weapons, the superpowers do not dare to confront each other directly. But they fight proxy wars, using the armed forces of lesser nations to try out their most-advanced weaponry and to challenge one another`s political goals. The Vietnam war, the various Middle East wars and the Angolan and Ethiopian civil wars have all been examples of this.

The latter half of this century also has seen the advent of terrorist warfare. It is not war in the conventional sense, large uniformed forces battling each other, but it is war in the sense that it is designed to overturn governments. The Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Basque separatist movement in Spain, the Red Brigades in Italy and the Red Army Faction in West Germany have all been outstanding practitioners of this kind of warfare.

Some wars, like the conflicts in the Middle East, have the potential for unleashing the ultimate horror, a global nuclear war between the superpowers. Others are fought in obscure corners of the world for obscure causes and are little noticed by anyone except those doing the killing and the dying. People fight increasingly over religion, a major source of the conflict between India`s Hindus and its Sikh minority. They fight over territory, over political ideals, over tribal differences. The Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Iraq have been in relatively constant warfare in recent years seeking political autonomy from all three governments. Some conflicts, like the civil war in Chad, have gone on for 20 years or more. The border war between Ethiopia and Somalia in the Ogaden region technically has lasted 23 years; in reality it has been erupting periodically for four centuries.

War in all its aspects, including preparation for it and defense against it, is the world`s biggest industry. Nations spend just over $1 trillion a year on military programs, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, which have never fought each other despite nearly four decades of armed confrontation, account for 83.5 percent of that expenditure. Nations of the world keep 25.9 million men and women under arms, with NATO and the Warsaw Pact accounting for 11.5 million of them.